Daisy Buchanan's Daughter Book 1: Cadwaller's Gun (35 page)

“Why, hello, Mr. Catton. Thank you, I’m well.” (Yes, daisysdaughter.com readers—’twas he. He was doing his bit like everyone else, and half the fun of belonging to my generation is that we all first bumped into each other at a Hitler-staged
bal masqué
.
That was often to make our civilian careers seem like the costume, not the restored identity.)

“Pam, for God’s sake, don’t you know it’s
illegal
for those women to be working the mines? Yes, we know about them. Yes, we know they’re only doing it to free up their men to go get shot at in Tunisia for the duration. And yes, that’s why we’re doing our best to turn a blind eye. It’s not going to give me an easy week now that you’ve gone poking around with a flashlight.”

“Poor man. Try drinking! Say, I’ve got an idea much neater than whiskey. Why not make it legal?”

I believe the current term is
venting
.
Legalizing mine work for women wasn’t something I’d been rash enough to advocate in print. I’d learned a bit from Edith by then about what the traffic would bear. A measure of which was his answering groan: “Are you joking or crazy?”

Since the women coal miners of Riceville, Tennessee—the wildcats, as they called themselves—are the most lost to history, they’re the ones whose
noms de guerre
in
Regent’s
I regret most. As I do the nonpreservation on film, other than soon to be extinguished Pamavision, of their imposing waddles and big-gloved hands unexpectedly bared for quick tasks by a tug of too few teeth and then regloved the same way. Shins that Hogarth had drawn with babies curled around them now braced to absorb a pneumatic drill’s recoil. Or the lack of any audio record, unlike Pam’s faint D-Day “Thank you” at the National Archives, of their voices’ gnarled grain and lewd laughter.

Someone not lost at all, on the other hand—like Edith Bourne Nolan’s, his Congressional title let me use his true name in
Regent’s
: I quoted him on shipyard absenteeism in “Liberty Belles,” October 21, 1942—is Murphy’s first cuckolder. He was also the last unless you count Roy. Then and later, my main reaction—unless you count dentitioned chuckles—was bewilderment. Didn’t he know there was a war on?

My hunch is his answer would’ve been “Yes, indeedy.” That form of wisdom was beyond the why-Henry’d, ungamahuched Pam who realigned her newly delingamed gams with my purse as a guide and rode home on the bus sans underwear, wondering if his pleasant receptionist collected or labeled the ripped panties she found in his office wastebasket. I suppose
l’équipe
here at
daisysdaughter.com
owes him anyway for the chance to parade some proof I wasn’t a complete wallflower at the orgy. Otherwise, Murphine Stalingrads aside, I’d be telling the depressingly sexless story of a ninny who spent her Columbian year in drydock.

Enough, though! Ard, enough. The phone may still ring and I’ve got to make up my mind, my pet, about keeping my date with Cadwaller’s gun if it turns out not to. The thought that all too many of you may never read anything else about the women who helped win World War Two has just curled this close-cropped hair of mine.

What does it matter if the Fifties re-encased them in Eisenhowerite Lucite? They did what they did and I saw it. Not to drive your dad nuts or awaken Manet’s competitive ghost, Panama, but I doubt even you in the Christmas-ornamented altogether would be a vision as thrilling as the first pilot I saw jogging in a baggy flying outfit to hoist herself into a cockpit and trundle down a muggy runway as tough grass grayed and bent at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas—the place names are real—one morning in February 1943.

At least in
Regent’s
,
her name was Jessica Auster of Coos Bay, Ore., and she was the dot in the sky in the opening sentence of my Houston-datelined rhapsody—with a detour to Delaware, where Nancy Harkness Love was training her own batch of flyers—to the Guinea Pigs, as the women in Jackie Cochran’s 319th WFTD were known. Google
Nancy Love
and
Jackie Cochran
for pictures that ought to hang in every college girl’s dorm; each noncombat mission their outfits flew freed up a male pilot for a combat one. They flew thousands.

I’d be embarrassed to tell you how often these fat-lunetted mimsies of mine have gone over every image available of Avenger Field with a magnifying glass held to my Mac’s screen. As I look in vain for Jessie’s tight locket face and maybe even a caption that would restore her true identity and unmollusked hometown, I think I might know her even in dorsal view; she had a way of slumping her weight to one hip and bracing the other with her far elbow out. No luck so far, none. But if she’s alive and reads this blog, perhaps she’ll recognize herself and comment in time.

“Edith!” I complained when I stopped back in Washington to fill out the picture with my usual dose of brass-hat imbecilisms and cuke-encumbered legislative rhubarb. “Do you know they don’t even get military benefits? They’re going to be flying bombers to England, for God’s sake. Does that sound like ‘Civil Service’ to you?”

“No, dear. It sounds like ‘flying bombers to England’ to me. Do you know how many the Eighth Air Force lost over St. Nazaire last week?”

“Not that many. Seven.”

“You
do
live high on the hog.”

“Well, I’ve seen the factories.”

“They’re certainly doing good work. You might try the graveyards. Or let’s hope POW camps. What on earth do you think we need night shifts making parachutes for?”

“The airborne.”

“With luck, yes. Maybe by summer, but I didn’t say that. As for the benefits, do you think I haven’t had Jackie and Nancy both on the phone? May I say
I
called
them
with pro forma apologies. They know we have to think about what—”

“The traffic will bear. Yes, I’ve heard.”

“Pam, I haven’t been interrupted since my second term.”

“Sorry,” I gulped. “Not pro forma, either.”

Edith beamed. “Nonsense. There’s no other kind of apology at your age. Feel free to pretend differently if you can make it amusing. And brief. I’m afraid I’ve got a committee meeting.”

Taking advantage of an acolyte’s permission to burn incense by getting incensed, I’d gotten into the habit of bickering with my Capitol Hill fairy godmother on our first long train trip. It was to Iowa—
les grand blés
still, no longer
sanglotants—
to see the first WACs graduate from officers’ training school at Fort Des Moines: “Gold Bars for a Redhead,”
Regent’s
,
September 9, 1942. Four hundred sixty-six women marched past the podium in broiling heat, their heads swiveling at “Eyes right” to snap Congresswoman Nolan and Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby a mass salute under their trim overseas caps. But when Edith prodded me, I couldn’t,
couldn’t
tell her why I’d snorted before my eyes resparkled with newly moist awe.

That distinguished woman had spent a lot less time than I did riding in talkative wartime rail coaches instead of gardenia-friendly compartments. She’d almost certainly never heard the universal service nickname for the khaki envelopes perched atop those determined coifs:
cunt caps
, if you must know. Decades later, as we watched the usual surprise horde of out-of-town laddybucks with strange marsupial accoutrements spill past our red light on Constitution Avenue, chanting “We’re here, we’re queer” and so forth, on what we District ancients always forget is Gay Pride Day—perhaps luckily, Bruce Catton was years in his grave—Nan Finn voiced her fuddlement: “Can someone please explain to me why they want
that
word back? Pam, do you have a clue?”

In spite of having a good deal more than one, I decided on reflection against telling the glorious girl my Fort Des Moines story. Dear Nan can garble a meaning the way Mozart could dash off a concerto, and often to as charming but chancy effect.

Once I got my own cunt cap in the ETO, I refused to ever call it anything else, embarrassing even Eddie Whitling sometimes. It had looked awfully stylish on the redhead of my story’s title: Lieutenant Connie Ostrica of New Haven, Conn., at least after Roy asked, “Where’s New Heaven?” She’d been as articulate as her distant lips’ switch from frictioned dismay to electric amusement had promised when, sizing up my best bet, I’d accosted her in the barracks with my usual explanation that I needed a viewpoint character. Or tailor’s dummy, in intra-office
Regent’s
parlance.

While I don’t think that figure of speech influenced my choice, there’s always a chance it did. If she wasn’t among the one in every thousand WACs who became casualties, Connie could’ve had her choice of lives. Mrs. Gerson used to half expect to run into her in Hollywood, in some scenarios after marquee proof she’d taken the name I’d invented for her in
Regent’s
. The probability is she just got Eisenhowerized into a baby factory for some executive.

Those unshrinking-violet eyes of hers made me sure he’d have money. He’d travel a lot too, keeping him serenely ignorant of her half waking languors as
by Pamela Buchanan
got tucked discreetly below the pulsatingly pulpy title (
Connie’s Secret
) of one of those lurid Fifties paperbacks on whose covers I’d occasionally spot her lookalikes gazing back at me in airport book racks before I grimly returned to reading Cotton Mather’s sermons or Washington’s report from Fort Necessity for
Glory Be
.
Anyhow, Connie should know—if she’s just Googled “Ostrica” for old times’ sake, if she’s come across daisysdaughter.com’s SOS from Potusville, if she’s tempted to give me a reason to re-footlocker Cadwaller’s gun—that it was for her sake I took up the cudgels with my Capitol Hill fairy godmother on our ride back from Iowa.

“Edith, for God’s sake!” I demanded. “Why aren’t they getting the same pay as men holding the same rank?”

“Why, are you?”

“I’m not in uniform.”

“Those come in all kinds, my girl. I’ve been wearing this one since 1925. Find your shop and stick with it. I must say this morning made me miss my old nursing rig.”

“From where?”

“Italy! Back in the first war. Had the most dreadful roommate too. Lord, she threaded the boys like popcorn. Pam, I hope I don’t need to remind you my bill sat in committee for nearly a year. I’ll do something about pay grades when the time is ripe.”

“What about command authority? Honestly, what good is it even calling them officers when they can’t give anyone orders outside the Women’s Army Corps? Even Oveta Hobby can’t, and she’s in
charge
.
Any dumb fuh—fool of a sergeant can tell her to go fly a kite. How could you let them get away with it?”

“They didn’t get away with anything.
I
did, and it took some doing, and I absolutely forbid you to bring up command authority in your article. Do you have any idea what a red flag that would be? They’d be asking me next if I wanted girls at West Point.”

“Don’t you?”

“Pam, Pam. The laughter would be ribald and the issue would be lost. I do think you ought to profile Oveta, though. Interesting woman, and the sooner this isn’t always about
me
,
the better.”

“You know it’s ridiculous she’s only a colonel, don’t you?”

“Of course I do. I sometimes think it’s preposterous I’m not President, but that’s what the traffic will bear. Are you riding all the way back to Washington with me, dear? We’d have such oodles of time to discuss my imaginary Presidency after I’ve napped.”

“No, I change in Chicago. I’m on my way to Detroit.”

I spent three days there for “The Mighty Flowers.” (“Oh, no, not again. I’ll apologize to Bran,” my editor said, and I said, “The hell you will, Roy. I’ve
had
that fight.”) In my own regulation bandanna and less than form-fitting sack suit, I watched new Sherman tanks get trundled chassis by ring-scarred chassis along one assembly line until their gun-needlenosed turrets were lowered onto them from another. That tempted me into an analogy about bees descending on daisies and gardenias which I gather, see title, must’ve survived Roy’s edit. Not until the ETO would I learn our mighty flowers weren’t up to snuff design-wise, outgunned by most Panzers and blazing like matchbooks at one well-placed shell. But we built fifty thousand of them, Panama—and we won.

Gloria Kamenica is almost certainly dead, though. Cadging each other’s cigarettes in a typhoon-foamed tavern, she and her three henchwomen—galleon-hipped Anna, Myra, Billie: my private toast
to my Columbian year—were a long way from maidenhood even then. Retrospectively breaking my heart, they were shy about showing re-muftied, once again “classy” me their homes, sending me back at closing time to my suddenly effete room at the Tuller despite Pam’s Rheingoldilocksy epiphany that I’d only capture Gloria if I could describe her cuke-unencumbered (Guadalcanal) tenement apartment.

The communal bathroom down the flavorful hall to which her sturdy legs carried her now dekerchiefed hair and robed peekabosom at the end of each long day. The fire escape she sometimes sat on for a final smoke and beer, listening to the trucks, the radio playing “Who Wouldn’t Love You” across the way and the 4-F down in 3-G banging his better half. Too tuckered and suddenly disconsolate to even find a nightgown, she crept into bed—and when I got back to Washington next, I was beside myself.

“
Edith!
Do you know the trick they’re pulling in Detroit these days?”

“That depends on which and whose. I’ll stick with a qualified yes unless the sun now comes up in the West there.”

“Even when they’re doing the identical work, management gives the women different job titles. Guess whose salary is smaller! And their union won’t do anything.”

“Dear me. You’ll be telling me next there isn’t one female shop steward in the whole plant.”

“Of course not, and the joke on me is that I spent years twitting away at cocktail parties about the wonderful, progressive labor movement. But all those idiots can think about is what’ll happen after the war.”

“What a coincidence! So am I. Oddly enough, so is the NAACP. It wasn’t easy getting the defense industry to open up all those skilled jobs to black folk,  but manpower’s manpower. It’s going to be interesting to see what Los Angeles looks like by 1960, since I very much doubt they’re all champing at the bit to move back to the plantation once we’ve won this thing and so does my colleague from Watts. Have you been to California yet?”

But
Regent’s
had an actual Negro on the racial beat: light-skinned and bow-tied Jim Bond, a decorous ex-Communist whose scholarshipped voice retained only the faintest burr of his Mississippi upbringing. Jim and not Pam wrote “Collard Greens and Palm Trees,” along with “If We Holler, Let Us Go” and “The Black Hawks’ War.” When he came back from Tuskegee, I’d just got done writing up Jackie Cochran’s Guinea Pigs, and he and I did exchange one awfully wry grin in the halls. The only time we were at odds was when I heard he’d complained about my turning Joy Sterling, as I’d called her, into the viewpoint character for “The Fuse.”

“Jim, let’s have this out,” I said when I saw him after
by Pamela Buchanan
’s account of life at Huntsville Arsenal had come out. “I don’t think you’ve used a woman as your tailor’s dummy even once. What does it matter what color she is?”

“In Alabama? Did you try asking her that?”